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- upon all cowards—shame upon them! Let ’em go drown like Pip, that
jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!”
During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip
was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now
that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon
there seemed no need of the carpenter’s box: and thereupon, when some
expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the
cause of his sudden convalescence was this;—at a critical moment, he
had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;
and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet,
he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter
of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a
word, it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to
live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale,
or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing,
generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day.
So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after
sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a
vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms
and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then
springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon,
pronounced himself fit for a fight.
With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.
Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on
his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet
and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written
out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a
mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in
his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one
volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own
live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore
destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon
they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought
it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his,
when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg—“Oh,
devilish tantalization of the gods!”
CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great
South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear
Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my
youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a
thousand leagues of blue.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should
rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of
mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all
that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing
like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by
their restlessness.
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